Margaret Heffernan: How to Map the Future
These are notes from Episode 2 of the Change Alchemist Podcast. I spoke with Margaret Heffernan to talk about her new book “Uncharted”
Shobhana Viswanathan: Not only are you a successful CEO, one of the foremost women thought leaders, you’ve also written many bestselling books. Tell us about your journey
Margaret Heffernan: The most striking thing about my journey is that I have never had a plan. if you had asked me when I was at university, what I would end up doing, I would never ever imagine any of the things.I was born in Texas. I grew up in the Netherlands. I moved to the UK when I was a teenager. And, decided that I wanted to go to university in the UK. So I went to Cambridge and when I left, I joined the BBC and a deeply, deeply crappy job.
I was a dictation typist. but because I couldn’t really decide what to do. So I was just doing temporary jobs and I joined the BBC and discovered that I really loved it. And so I then got promoted a lot and made radio programs for about five years and then moved to television, made television documentaries in dramas and got very, you know, especially as I worked in television, got more and more involved in the, in the production and finance side of television.
I moved into that space and I really liked it. Yeah. Because it was brand new. There weren’t any rules. I really like the people who were very smart and imagined it and creative, and I ended up running tech companies for venture capitalists. And I loved it. I mean, it’s the best working period I think I’ve ever had.
And then they just came a point where I thought I want my kids to grow up in the UK. So, we moved back here and I was also pretty burned out. Yeah
Shobhana: How did you start writing?
I friend said I wrote like an angel. And so that’s what gave rise to my first book, which was called The Naked Truth, a Working Woman’s Manifesto, which I think it’s fair to say, like all my books it was way ahead of its time, because it was in a period of real doldrums as far as feminism was concerned.
I really discovered these amazing statistics about the rise of female entrepreneurship in the U S and so I wrote my second book, which is called Women On Top. That was really interesting because it was showed, you know, that almost 50% of private businesses in the U S are owned and run by women, that they were more likely to be successful.
They were creating more jobs, they were more profitable. They were more likely to last a decent period of time. And I kept thinking, wow, how come I never knew this? I mean, it was kind of interesting because the women, you know, I talked to who would also be, you know, what are you doing now, Margaret? I tell them I was doing this.
They’d say, well, where are you going to find these companies? And of course the truth is they were everywhere. I’d written two books about women.
So people thought that was all I had all I knew about. And also the only audience that I could talk to. And, you know, there’s this very famous phenomenon where women buy books by men and women, but men buy books by men. And I thought, well, I’ve got to get out of this kind of straight jacket. and I wrote a book about, I spent a year researching a book on the nature of individual and institutional resilience, and is 2007.
And, it wasn’t a single publisher in the world that wanted to hear about resilience at the time, because everything was going great. We’d apparently eliminated boom and bust. And we didn’t need to know about resilience because nothing bad was ever going to happen again. So that vote never got commissioned.
The next book was Willful Blindness. Which was gee, when all the evidence is in front of you, how come we miss seeing so many thing?And that was very fueled by the banking crisis, by the crisis of the Catholic church in Ireland, the scandals of pedophilia and corruption.
It was very fueled by a lot of what I learned about the Second World War when I was living in the Netherlands. And, and that book was very, very successful. So it was a finalist for the prize.It isone of the most important books of the decade. And it definitely got me out of my straight jacket.
And then I wrote another book called A Bigger Prize- how competition doesn’t really unction the way that economists say it does. and the theory that it brings out the best in people is not true. I might argue that actually it creates huge amounts of aggression and friction.
And then by the people who run Ted to write a little tiny book, which by now is quite appealing, which is called Beyond Measure, which is probably the only pure business book I’ve ever written. And then just recently I wrote Uncharted, which is about how we don’t understand the future.
And what’s kind of interesting about the five major books I’ve written, you know, not counting the little Ted book is that every single one of them was ahead of its time. Willful blindness came out when almost every institution in the world from banks to Volkswagen to General Motors to Equifax was willfully blind. two terrible things that happened inside of them. A Bigger Prize came out before people started to see that competition was actually destroying the planet and Uncharted came out before the pandemic
Shobhana: Uncharted seems prescient. You’ve talked about things that nobody could have known about. tell us how, and what your thought process was and how you actually map the future.
Margaret: When I think a lot of people didn’t know what was going to happen, I find it fascinating. You were able to do that. Well, I mean, this is what I, you gotta do this deliberately. I just keep doing it. And I couldn’t tell you, I mean, I can kind of tell you how, but I can’t tell you why. It’s just, I guess I notice things.
I tend to notice very small things and wonder what they mean, and then start seeing if there are everywhere else. Hmm. and I’m not particularly focused on hitting what’s popular and I’m not particularly trying. I’m not, I’m not trying to please an existing market.
This makes life harder for me and harder for my publishers, because as they keep telling me, people don’t know what part of the bookstore to put my books in. And I keep pointing out to them that most people don’t buy books in bookstores anymore.
It’s something that only non historians believe and that even things like psychological profiling, DNA cannot tell your future. The future has all kinds of cases or mistakes in it that are fundamentally unpredictable.
The argument of the book is until we get our heads around that we call find better, smarter ways to think and to lead our lives. And so, f you buy this argument, what do we do? And of course, when I was writing in the book, I thought the, you know, the, the argument against predictability was a pretty tough challenge and that most people would just find it impossible to accept.
And then the pandemic came along and pretty much won the argument for me. So, and I also thought, you know, people talk about uncertainty, but they don’t really know what it is or how it feels. I think that problem has gone away. I think the only real difficult differences people don’t understand that part of the essence of uncertainty is that it can’t be quantified.
It’s a unique characteristic. but I think most of my books kind of have this argument implicit in them that the, the ways that we’re doing things, the ways that we’re thinking about things are wrong and we’re never going to get to better insight until we find better ways to think.
Shobhana: I really liked one of the comments you made, right? Which you said where you said phones and soundtracks and music and fountains replaced, genuine and unpredictable human contact with a seamless soundtrack, from a bad movie and a cliche that makes us believe we must all be happy. so how do you kind of bring the human factor as.
Margaret: You know, as we, as we kind of get into a remote workforce, what’s remote work with technology, how do you weave that humanity in our lives and in our business? So I think that two different parts of this question, I think the first one is about, you know, where are we going to be working? And everybody seems very, fascinated by this question.
Are we going to be working all from home forever? Are we all going to go back to the office and do business as usual? And I think anytime you frame a question as a binary, you know, you’re missing the mark. A lot ofmy own perspective on that specific question is that. we have a fantastic offer opportunity to redesign work.
One of the things that’s so fascinating is lots of companies have done surveys to ask people, you know, how they want to work and, and whether they want to come back to work, nobody wants to go back to working the way they did. I mean, the one company where 3% of people wanted to do that. You know, which caused me to ask myself, how is it?
We managed to get millions of people to work in a way they hate for decades. And why do we think we had a productivity problem? Because we’re making people work in ways they hate. So there’s a fantastic opportunity, I think, to release a lot of trap productivity by rethinking how we work. But I don’t think that means, okay, so everybody’s at home now because people don’t like that a hundred percent.
Either they don’t like working at home with their kids under their feet. They don’t like not seeing their colleagues. They know that collaboration suffers. So I think, you know, the really successful organizations will do a lot of experiments about what the right configuration is. I don’t think it’s going to be the same for every function.
I think finance may prefer to work from home more and marketing might like to be in the office. More sales teams typically do like to get together because they’re on the road quite a lot. So I think, you know, the really clever companies will spend a lot of time talking to people and then they’ll do lots of experiments with lots of different configurations and tweakers and improve them.
And come up with something that’s really compatible with their business, with them, people in, with their culture. And I don’t think there will be a one size fits all to this. And I think the companies that think there is we think they’ve found one or buy one from a consulting company, we’ll have missed an opportunity to do something really in specially unique for themselves.
I think, you know, then there’s the second, much more deep question. About how we work together, which is, you know, one of the big revelations during this period. Well, they’re two big revelations. One is that we, most companies move people to remote working quickly. Yeah. And false and well, and we’re very alert to the fact that they needed to take care of people and pay attention to people and make sure they were okay.
And lo and behold, when they took care of people and showed that they cared about them, what did they discover that their people were much better at change than they’d ever imagined, and that they suddenly became very productive. In other words, they’d underestimated the capacity to produce change. And they’ve underestimated the importance of managing people as though you care about them.
And I think it’s kind of nuts that these are big revelations, but I think the really important thing is how do you keep those two things going? How do you keep the capacity for change going given a lot is going to change in the next 10 years. And how do you keep caring about people? And I think there’s a lot we can do online.
I think there’s a lot we can and should do offline. One of the things I’ve been doing is sending lots of postcards to people. Cause I don’t necessarily have a lot to say to them, but I like sending them something beautiful. Just to think about. And, you know, they quite often send me really amazing, same things back that are beautiful and something to think about.
So I think it’s going to require creativity of which, you know, human beings have a lot. And I think that it’s going to take quite an effort to be flexible. Not too rigid. And to find ways, even in the terrible current circumstances of seeing people face to face in every way and on each occasion that we can, because every time I do that, I find it phenomenally energizing.
Shobhana: Thank you. I’d like to talk about Willful Blindness for a moment here. I was struck by the insights from the book. where you talked about 85% of people not taking action even when they see something is wrong.. And I see this as, as a working professional. It is obvious to me, there are certain things that need to happen, but people aren’t speaking up. Is there a formula? Is there something we can do to kind of be the catalyst for that change? Because this was an obvious insight, but I had to read your book too to actually put my finger on it.
Margaret:Willful blindness is about the degree to which when things go wrong in a company, whether it’s a Volkswagen’s emission scandal or Wells Fargo or the Equifax data breach, the narrative is always the same: Oh, we could never have seen this coming.
And then it turns out that a couple of people did see it coming. And then it turns out that lots of people. SSo the challenge around these kinds of situations is not the people don’t know when things are going wrong in a company. People always know, everybody knows. The challenge is how do you get them to speak up about it in a way that can be hard.
And, you know, the answer to that difficult question is quite complex. Part of it is about making people feel that this is what they’re expected to do and want. And that, that is a desirable behavior so that when, you know, but every manager in the world says, you know, I’ll never shoot the messenger, but they do shoot the messenger.
Absolutely. We’ll see them shoot the messenger. And they’ll say things like, you know, my door is always open, but you know, the door is always open. And then the difficult conversation is finished. You pick up the phone to your lawyer and say:Can I fire this person?
So I think it’s a number of things. I think it’s mission critical to everybody’s sanity and mental health to have friends at work. And I’m shocked and appalled that many people now say they don’t because they don’t think it’s safe or they’re afraid people will gossip or afraid that it’ll look like favoritism.
If you don’t have friends, people you like hanging out with and can tell the truth to, and at that point if you can confirm what you’ve seen and it matters to these friends, allies and colleagues, you can start talking about “What do we do? “. Because it’s much safer to do things as a group than as an individual.
Shobhana: Margaret, you are a professor. What course do you teach?
Margaret: It’s called Giving Voice to Values. It was originally designed by a wonderful woman at Babson named Mary Gentilly. And, and she’s given me that permission now to teach it in all sorts of places, which I like doing because I can weave it into my work. Willful Blindness research and the two things sit together, hand in glove.
Shobhana: That’s fantastic. You also said that one of the sad truths about leadership is the higher you get the less you know. How does that intersect with Willful blindness? On the one hand 85% of people don’t take action, but then leaders may not know what they don’t know. How do you solve that?
Margaret: Well, I think the first to understand that power is a problem. And everybody wants power. I want to get higher, higher, higher, you know? And the difficulty is the more powerful you become. You know, the more people will suck up to you. And the more they’ll second guess you, and then more, they’ll try to figure out what is it you want to hear rather than what is the truth.
And it’s really important for leaders to realize this. That, you know, no matter how much they say they want the truth, people behave differently in the company of powerful people than in the company of their peers. So, you know, that’s why I think coaching and mentoring so important, you know, to put it for leaders, to have people who have as it were a permission and whose job it is to be very frank and open, But I think the other problem is as you get higher up in the organization, you get further away from the action.
And I think this is one reason why we’ve seen in many corporate circles, the rise of hackathons, the rise of open innovation platforms and the rise of open strategy. So mechanisms whereby as much of the organization is involved in talking about what the organization should do and how.
In order to make sure that the knowledge that’s all over the place can be collected and used is one of the hardest, hardest, hardest problems in management, which is how do those at the top, know what everybody else knows. And how did they release the knowledge, insight, and creativity of people who are often buried beneath bureaucracy and hierarchy and power games.
Shobhana: When you mentor CEOs and top leaders, are there some themes that are emerging, and have they changed over time? You’ve been a leader for a long time and you’re giving back, what are your thoughts on the kinds of questions people are most interested in learning answers to.
Margaret: Well, they’re very, very interested in learning how to make better decisions and what a good decision looks like.They’re very interested in communication. very often people get at the top of organizations because of technical skills of which communication is rarely considered to be one. And suddenly they’re in a job where communication is a huge part of the job. So, how do you communicate to different kinds of people?
They’re very interested in, how do you provoke and manage? What I think of is constructive conflict. How do you get a good argument, productive argument going at the board table, the senior leadership team table. so that some real thinking can happen instead of second guessing, I would say those are the top ones.
The really big issues are: How do I release the talent that I know is in my organization?
Shobhana: Are these themes fairly consistent across men and women? is there any gender lens that you would view this true?
Margaret: I don’t think so. I mean, I think women have an issue — which is how do I get the guys to take me seriously? And the women have, and the men have an issue around how I can get the women to act more like me! Everybody has an issue with how do I create a more diverse team? And, it’s a sort of question that I now kind of have run out of patience for, because I just think, well, do you really, really, really want to do it?
Because if you do, how do you get everything else in the organization working for you, assigning goals and targets. And, reward the people who hit them and don’t reward the people who don’t. So if you really mean it, that’s what you’re going to do.
And so I think the real issue is lots of times people kind of mean it, but if it becomes a trade off, then they back off and that’s the thing that’s very difficult here. And, it makes me very unpopular to say this, but if we’re going to get the kind of diversity, what we’re talking about, gender diversity and ethnic racial diversity sacrifices are going to have to be made.
Why did it say 12 board seats? And right now they’re all being held. Let’s say by white men then, Then the other white men who those seats as there one day have to accept that some of them are going to be held by women. Some of them are going to be held by African Americans. Some of them are going to be held by Asians, you know, so other might be held by disabled people and all sorts of things and, and F and nobody likes to admit that.
Actually to change things, which is, I know the heart of your interests. You have to make trade off that one day when the board is diverse, everybody will look at it and it will seem obvious. But between where we are today, where boards are primarily white men to where we need to get to, so sacrifices will need to be made.
This is what leadership is about, which is making some hard decisions for the longterm.
Shobhana: If you were to characterize your leadership style how would you define it? BI think you achieved so much. I I’d like to think you’re a born leader, but I’m sure you’ve honed your leadership style over time.
Margaret: Well, I learned a lot by making a lot of mistakes. I mean, lots and lots and lots of mistakes. Fortunately, none absolutely fatal, but, yeah, lots of mistakes often thinking I was clever than I was often thinking the problem was simpler than it was. The fundamental lesson I’ve learned is that on the whole, when you trust people, they trust you.
A classic case in point when I was running tech companies in the U S a number of my female employees, my employees had, became pregnant with their first chile/ And they would come up and ask me what to do about maternity leave. And of course there’s no statutory maternity leave in the state of Massachusetts.What is covered is disability. And, I used to say” look, do what you want. Do what suits you. You’ve never been a mother before. You don’t know what you’re going to want. So go away, have your baby. We’ll keep you on the payroll of when you’re ready to come back, come back the way you want to. I have to say there was not a single person who ever let me down.
I think slackers free riders are a 5% problem. The 95% problem is how do you get the very best out of people? And I think you get the very best out of people by giving them hard problems and the resources they need, and then trusting them to figure it out.
Shobhana: Margaret, you achieved so much in your life. you’ve traveled everywhere. You’ve written books. You’ve been a CEO. You mentor people. What is your superpower? If you were to bottle that superpower, what would you label it as?
Margaret: I think my superpowers, I don’t belong anywhere. I think I’m just, I am an outsider.I’m an American living in England and I’m an artist who worked in tech. I’m a tech person who works in the arts. you know, I’ve spent most of my life in cities and I now live in the countryside. They just don’t, you know, I’m people think I write business books, but other people think that they’re books of philosophy.
I mean, I just don’t, I cannot be pigeonholed and I think that gives me huge freedom. And I think it takes me a fantastically interesting places.
I’m very good at change. I’m very good at speaking different languages. I mean, both literally and metaphorically and I’m good at being the outsider.
Shobhana: That’s fabulous. I haven’t heard that superpower mentioned before, but it sounds like a cool one to have.
Shobhana: What are your thoughts on the Silicon Valley and innovation? S
Margaret: Do you think that Silicon Valley is really that wildly diverse? I think there is a very heavy reliance on software and technology to the point where I think everyone’s building something and everyone has a business plan.
And it’s always about the next new idea, whether it’s an AI or ML or data science or what have you. So to that extent, it’s not diverse. and it’s also not diverse from the standpoint of thought. And the fact that gender diversity has become a horror story is a problem. And I think that a monoculture, having such a powerful impact on the world is incredibly dangerous.
Shobhana: How can we — at an individual level and a company and leadership level solve this issue?
Margaret: You have to seek out very different kinds of people hire very different kinds of people. Stop hiring for skills. For God’s sake, you can teach skills and start hiring for imagination, genuine creativity, I think that the act of writing switching software is a very, very particular thing, because what you’re doing is you’re writing code, which makes people act in a certain way.
So you want to have people doing it who are not of an authoritarian mindset. Or you start to make some pretty nasty products and come up with some pretty nasty concepts. And that’s why the world is increasingly skeptical, critical, nervous about the homogeneity of Silicon Valley.
Shobhana: You bring up a good point and there’s a documentary social dilemma, which talks about how algorithms are hacking our brain. You bring up a really good point
Shobhana: So you said don’t hire for skills, right? So what would you hire for if I would a leader in Silicon Valley and I want to follow your advice and say, okay, I’m not going to hire a guy that has a master’s in computer science, but I’m going to look for other skills.
Margaret: Attitude, aptitude and ethics. Look for people who love learning and, and look for people who can think about truly hard problems, which are ethical problems. I mean, look at Stewart Butterfield at Slack, right? know, so I just think the way that talent is defined within Silicon Valley and the incentives that bring people to Silicon Valley, militate against it being as creative and as trustworthy as it could be.
You know, having spent a lot of my career in tech, this is not an anti-tech position. It’s just thinking, wow, this could be very, very, very much better for the world than it currently is. No, that’s a certainly food for thought. And, you know, I let’s see how the world shapes up and how Silicon Valley changes in the next few years.
Shobhana; I think there’s an opportunity for change. What are some books that have influenced you?
Margaret: I think Adam Grant’s book Give and Take is just fantastic.And I think for a Wharton professor to come out and say that people who give generously are more successful in life than people who take was a brilliant thing to do. And I think he makes the argument so wonderfully. Well, one of my favorite books at the moment, which I read this summer is a book called learning from the Germans, which is about how the Germans came to terms with their Nazi past.
Shobhana: It’s truly fascinating to be speaking with you. I’d like to see if you have any advice for young women leaders that are trying to make a mark in the world and trying to make something of the world.
Margaret; I’ve done work with a lot of female leaders and many brilliant and very successful. And even the most successful of them really didn’t know how good they were. Take pride in your achievements, own them, really.
People often ask me, what’s the source of confidence, the source of confidence, isn’t any motivational speaker, the source of confidence is being able to look at your achievements and say: I made that happen or I helped to make that happen. And to be able to contain within yourself, pride in what you’ve achieved.
Shobhana: Beautiful. That is so wonderful. thank you, Margaret. It was a pleasure talking to you.
Margaret; Thank you Shobhana for your interest in my work and for your time and for the wonderful conversation and questions and good luck with everything you do and whatever you do next.
